Putin defends Iran and eyes up nuclear fuel deal

President Vladimir Putin openly defied Washington yesterday by announcing a visit to Iran less than a week before a summit with President Bush.

Mr Putin welcomed Iran's national security chief, Hassan Rohani, to the Kremlin and declared that Tehran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, flatly contradicting repeated allegations by the US.

Moscow has also signalled that Alexander Rumyantsev, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency, will fly to Tehran next Saturday to sign a deal that would open the way for delivery of nuclear fuel to a Russian-built reactor in Bushehr.

Ahead of the US-Russian summit in Bratislava on Thursday, Mr Putin has also defied Washington over Syria, another state the Bush administration is trying to isolate. Russia has announced the sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Damascus.

Under the Iranian nuclear deal, spent fuel would be returned to Russia, but only after 10 years. Nuclear proliferation experts fear that without adequate safeguards the spent fuel could easily be converted to plutonium for bombs. The spent fuel repatriation deal would also open the way for nuclear fuel deliveries to the Bushehr reactor.

The fuel is ready for delivery within weeks, officials have said, and the plant could be operational by 2006.

After his meeting with Mr Rohani, President Putin declared: "The latest steps by Iran convince Russia that Iran indeed does not intend to produce nuclear weapons and we will continue to develop relations in all sectors, including peaceful atomic energy."

He added: "I have received an invitation from the Iranian leadership to visit your country and we are preparing for a visit to Iran".

If signed, the nuclear fuel deal could upset European efforts to persuade Iran to cease uranium enrichment - another possible route to a nuclear warhead. Tehran has agreed only to suspend enrichment until next month.

President Bush refused again yesterday to rule out military action, but said diplomacy was his preferred course.

"First of all, you never want a president to say never, but military action is certainly not, is never, the president's first choice," he told Belgian television. "Diplomacy is always the president's, or at least always my first choice, and we've got a common goal, and that is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon."

David Albright, a nuclear expert and director of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said: "Russia should respect the uncertainty of the situation and hold back until this is clarified, but people [in the Russian nuclear power industry] may just want to make money and they're thinking, "Let's do this now'."

ISIS published satellite photographs yesterday which showed the construction of big tunnels near a uranium conversion plant in Iran. The tunnels have been shown to the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Mr Albright said they could be used to move equipment underground with the intention of processing uranium away from international scrutiny and sheltered from a possible air strike.

Russia is not only building Iran an $800m nuclear plant at Bushehr, but training hundreds of Iranian scientists across Russia, a transfer of materials and knowledge that has infuriated Washington.

The US has long maintained that Iranian nuclear energy development is a front for a weapons programme, while Israel has said Iran is six months away from having the knowledge to make a nuclear bomb.

· The Syrian president, Bashar Assad, has appointed his brother-in-law, Brigadier-General Asef Shawkat, to replace the chief of military intelligence, General Hassan Khalil.